“Life is about expansion,” he once boomed to junior recruits at the CIA training centre in Virginia, otherwise known as the Farm. And then he would point out with his trademark guffaw that his physical size had kept pace with his expansive nature, as well as with his other, more worldly assets in the thirty years since the agency had first invited him to serve his country.
“I’m twice the man I once was,” he would proudly, and accurately, proclaim.
Back in the 1960s, when he was a fit, agile sportsman adventurer at the age of twenty-two, he had entirely illegally entered Soviet-occupied Central Asia on foot, off his own bat. He proceeded to learn four of the local languages and cultivated local mafiosi, who twenty-five years later would become the foundation stones of Russia’s new capitalism.
He and his then new wife, Martha, honeymooned for a year in the mountains of Afghanistan with his Pathan tribesmen friends, one of whom would, in maturity, come to control half the world’s heroin trade. Under various noms de plume, he spent his spare time writing academically entertaining articles for National Geographic.
He swept through Central Asia like the Karaburan wind, befriending old-style Communist bosses, medieval mullahs, anti-Communist revolutionaries, criminals, royalty, fixers, taxi drivers, and spies with equal bonhomie.
His world, as he would put it to the wide-eared recruits at the Farm, was the world according to Burt.
And now, after forty years as the self-proclaimed King of the Stans, his Central Asian beat, he owned the Coca-Cola franchise for half the region, prime vineyards in the south of France, an island in the Caribbean, and a network of agents in Russia’s former territories who were not only source material for his intelligence operations but also a lucrative business partnership for his numerous commercial activities, some of which failed, but most of which succeeded.
As he told his younger, more awestruck operatives after their graduation—when like a fairy-tale uncle he took them on clandestine CIA adventures—things usually worked out how he wanted them to; and if they didn’t, it meant he had simply been mistaken about what he’d wanted.
“Self-belief is ninety percent of the battle in this game,” he told them. “Same as in any game. But most important to remember is this—omniscience isn’t part of the human condition,” he added with another bellow of laughter.
And now, sitting in the plush varnished teak saloon of the yacht Divinity, which gently rolled, blacked out and brooding, off the coast of Marseille’s industrial zone, Burt, like Socrates before his students, was regaling another team of his boys, new acolytes he’d tempted away from the agency to serve in his own private company. He was giving them the world according to Burt.
“God,” he said jovially. “God is what happens. That’s all you need to know. What happens is why we’re here. The rest is nothing.”
And what had happened with Logan’s missive concerning the Russian colonel undoubtedly had this divine hand, perceived by Burt in any case, behind it.
“It’s Burt’s line to God that counts,” he said, beaming, but with a large slice of self-mockery rather than any evangelical or otherwise religious connotation. “Remember that, boys,” he instructed the three pumped-up young men in black combat fatigues that he had unsuccessfully tried to head them off from wearing. “Much time is wasted, many lives, and untold sums of money, on what might happen, or on what has happened. But all you need to devote your underdeveloped minds and overdeveloped bodies to is what happens. What happens is king, god, and all the philosophy you’ll ever need.”
As his words ricocheted around the confined space of the yacht’s saloon like trapped birds, they were met with puzzlement, admiration, and a kind of wonderment at the meaning behind his arcane statements from the three young men, who suspected the teacher was good—great, even—but didn’t really have a clue what he was talking about.
Larry, Joe, and Christoff were more at home on the assault course than in the library.
So Burt colonised God with the same broad-minded good humour with which he colonised a new recruit, a disaffected tribal chief, or a factory in Tajikistan that made anything from aluminium to ladies’ hairpins. He was a clown with a brain, a trickster with unassailable cunning, and he cultivated an image of buffoonery you believed at your peril.
He offered the three young warriors accompanying him a glass of premier cru Château Laroque for the third time, and for the third time they refused.
The upper echelons of the CIA, with one or two crucial exceptions, regarded Burt’s spiritual views as an aberration derived from some strange Eastern influence he had picked up on his travels. But even his detractors couldn’t deny the evidence of his great effectiveness, both as an operative and an inspiring instructor to the latest talent, and now as the owner of one of America’s big three private intelligence firms.
For his maverick and independent mind, as well as—it has to be said—his financial independence and impeccable contacts, he was a prized asset to the CIA, the NSA, and all the rest of America’s government spy agencies. He was much needed, indeed loved, by the agency big shots, as much as they were wary and at times disapproving of his modus operandi and his general joie de vivre.
Burt had found himself on the wrong side of agency policy many times in recent years, but he had worked with it, lain low, waited for the policy to change—unlike his old Brit acquaintance, Finn, who had tried to change things and died for his trouble.
For one, Burt derided the abject worship of the electronic intelligence “that has taken over our intelligence community like a cargo cult landing from the skies on a Stone Age tribe.” And he had the human intelligence from his own network of sources to reveal the weaknesses of this overreliance on technology. Burt claimed not to be able to use a computer, and every so often, as here now on the yacht, or in one of the numerous private clubs around the world to which he belonged, he would wave a huge Havana cigar at imaginary American satellites up in the heavens.
“They might be able to see what brand of cigar I’m smoking,” he would say. “They might even be able to sniff its aroma, for all I know. But there is one thing they can’t see—and which is all that really matters—and that is the intentions of the man who’s smoking it.”
He was now sixty-two years old, his athletically charged youth superseded thanks to doing exactly what he liked in the smoke, drink, and food department. Accentuated by an expensive light blue blazer and a pair of lurid yellow slacks that totally negated the camouflaged blackness of his team, his rotundity seemed to swell even beyond its natural limits to include the yacht, the sea, and the grey, all but invisible shore beyond, towards which he now looked keenly for a sign through a polished brass porthole.
But it was a cell phone on the blacked-out yacht that gave the signal. It was answered by Larry, the taller of the twenty-somethings.
“She’s heading south,” he informed Burt. “She’s with the Hungarian. We have all three cars on them.”
“You can bet Willy’s seen at least one of them.” Burt chuckled. “One of the best, Willy is.”
“We think the French have at least two vehicles with them too. Unmarked. One of them’s some kind of utility truck,” Larry added, with one finger now pressed to the ear without the phone, just in case Burt made one of his louder exclamations.
“And the Russians?” Burt said. “Have we any Russians?”
Larry repeated this question into the phone and shook his head at Burt. “We don’t know. Maybe. The autoroute’s packed with vacationers, both sides, north and south.”
“And then there’s the Brits,” Burt said. “We can be sure that Logan hasn’t just invited us to the party.” He beamed hugely. “It’s like the Wacky Races out there.”